I've been complaining about chairs for as long as I've been a massage therapist. That's 24 years of the same rant, so it's time I put it in writing.
We are trained to sit. It starts in kindergarten: sit still, sit up straight, stay in your seat. Every year of school adds more hours. Then college, then a career at a desk. By the time we're adults, most of us have spent decades getting very good at one thing: sitting for longer than the body can muscle through.
It's a problem of an educated society. The more schooling and the more desk work, the more hours in the chair, and the more the body pays for it.
Sitting is work
Sitting looks like rest. It isn't. To hold you upright in a chair, the muscles of your back, hips, neck and shoulders have to stay switched on, hour after hour, barely moving.
A working muscle depends on blood moving in and out. Blood brings in what the cells need to keep working and carries away what they've used up. When you hold the same position for hours, that flow slows to a trickle. The cells are left with only what they started with. As they burn through it, the byproducts build up, and with nothing to wash them away, they become inflammation.
Without that exchange, the muscle stalls. Not just its flexibility, but its ability to contract and do everything a muscle does. Muscles are built to change shape. When they don't get to do that regularly, they lose the ability, at least for a while. They're frozen in time until blood gets moving again.
So when the muscles can't keep up with what the posture demands, the body finds another way to hold you up.
The body's workaround: fascia
That other way is fascia, the connective tissue that wraps and links every muscle in the body. When the muscles can't hold the posture anymore, the body builds up the fascia to do the job instead, thicker and tighter, like scaffolding around a building.
I feel it on the table every week in people who sit for a living. The tissue is dense and stuck instead of soft and springy, through the hips, the backs of the legs, the low back, and up into the shoulders and neck. Their muscles aren't just tight. They've been braced in place.
The scaffolding does its job: it holds you in your chair. The trouble is that it doesn't come down when you stand up.
Where this goes next
This is the start of a chain reaction. Next time I'll get into the hamstrings, which take a beating from sitting in a way most people never think about, and why it doesn't matter whether they're long or short. After that: what massage and training can do to undo the damage, so you can keep doing the work that puts you in a chair without paying for it in your back, neck and shoulders.
A plan for your chair
Before you sit. If you know you're about to sit longer than your body likes, give it a moment first. Stretch your hamstrings, do a few squats, or take a short walk. A minute of movement gets the blood flowing before the long hold starts.
Every 30 to 45 minutes. When you get the chance, stand up for a minute or two. Stretch your quads, touch your toes, sink your butt toward the floor, then reach for the ceiling. Not all at once; pick a couple and mix them up. Walk to the water cooler and back, then sit back down. Keep it up all day.
At the end of the day. When you're finally done sitting, do it one more time. Let your body decompress before you settle in for the evening.
While you're sitting. Blood flow and warmth are flexibility. A seat cushion made of large wooden beads gives the hamstrings a little stimulation, which keeps blood moving. A seat heater or a small body warmer keeps the tissue warm.
If your back, neck or shoulders are already complaining about your chair, that's the work I do every day in my East Cobb office. You can book a session online whenever you're ready.
Daniel Jackson, LMT, BCTMB
Board Certified Massage Therapist, On Point Massage, East Cobb